THE dust has settled on a double header of crucial games, played between two sides who have fought it out for the Scottish Women’s Premier League title in recent seasons.

Celtic have been left to pick themselves up after two meetings with reigning champions Glasgow City, losing out narrowly in the League Cup a fortnight ago before suffering a heavy 3-0 defeat at the weekend.

The mood in the camp at Lennoxtown has been fairly philosophical, in the sense that the results served as a little reminder of the sometimes painful learning experiences that lie in store for this very young squad of players.

The new season has brought a complete change of regime at the club, with Peter Caulfield, for many years the succesful manager of Glasgow City, taking the reins from Robert Docherty.

A number of experienced and long-serving players have left, some to rival sides and the club has turned to their own Academy structure to replenish the ranks, promoting some of the young players who have progressed through a system that was put in place when the club was first founded back in 2007.

In this week’s SWPL round-up we speak to Peter Caulfield, manager of the Celtic FC Women’s Team, about recent results and the season ahead.

The second of your double-headers with Glasgow City ended in a 3-0 defeat at the weekend. Looking back, what was your view of the match?

It was a match in which we certainly felt we could have performed better. Given how well the team played last week against the same opponents, we didn't manage to reach the same level and we are disappointed with that. But I have to be mindful of how young this team is and that they will have up and down performances until they gain more experience.

The cup meeting the week before seemed a much more close-run affair?

Absolutely. We moved the ball much more quickly in this game and were able to impose ourselves on more experienced opponents. That was a very pleasing aspect of the game for me with such young players, as we had periods of good control in the game. Apart from set-pieces, where City are very strong and managed to score, we didn't really look under great pressure from open play.

You ran City so close in the league last season and have been their main competition pretty much since you were established in 2007. Will this be the year you finally get your hands on the title?

It is far too early for Celtic to talk in these terms. Of course you hope to go close and it is every player’s dream to win the title regardless of which club you play for. However, we need to focus on development and performance with this team at present as there are many more experienced teams in the league.

There have been a few changes again in the summer and you lost a few players to Rangers.That kind of transfer would have made headlines in the men’s game, but people seem to move between rival clubs much more freely in women’s football. Is that the case?

Yes it is. There is a continual merry-go-round of players moving clubs in the women's game and the lack of player contracts doesn't help. This is frustrating if you are trying to build a team, which is why the Club decided to move Celtic towards giving younger players from our own Academy an opportunity. This is already a tight-knit group and they enjoy being together and working to develop as players. I am convinced this will also breed a greater loyalty and be beneficial to the club in the long term.

Once again you are tackling the league with a team built on a backbone of young Academy graduates. Just how is the Celtic team looking this season?

I am extremely pleased with the players and their attitude to what we want to achieve at the Club. They are a great bunch to work with and have shown a massive appetite to improve and are beginning to set their own high standards. We have around fifty players in the Academy aged fifteen or over, who are eligible to play for the first team. However, we have only four players over nineteen years old at the Club, which emphasises the road we have gone down to give young players a chance. It is an entirely new coaching staff as well this season, so we are very much in the early days of development but I am happy that everything is moving in the right direction and I am still confident we will have a good season.

S uzanne Grant and Gemma Fay are two of your best-known players, but who should we be looking out for this season?

Don’t forget Rhonda Jones, another international with over 100 caps, who is also very well known. Like Suzanne and Gemma, she is hugely influential on the younger players. This is a really difficult question to answer as all the players have different qualities and they all bring something to the team. I expect all of the players to have periods in the season where they perform very well. This is an exciting group who are all extremely talented and most have already represented Scotland at national level, at various age groups. It will be interesting to watch their development throughout this season to see who can make the biggest impact.

Now into your sixth year as an SWPL team, just how big a task has it been for Celtic to build and develop the entire women’s structure, from Academy to first team – and has it been worth it?

It has been a mammoth task for Celtic to build an entire structure but the decision to focus firstly on building an Academy, sometimes at the expense of the first team, has been one of the best decisions made at the Club in my opinion. While everyone naturally looks at the first team to gauge progress, I think many are now taking notice of what the Academy has brought to the Club. We have players who joined the club as young as ten years of age who are now playing first team football and a recent review showed we have had over forty Academy players making a total of over four-hundred first team appearances already, scoring over 150 goals in the process. This is the real hallmark of our success and in that respect I have to pay tribute to the coaches we have at all Academy age groups as they have done an outstanding job in aiding the development of these players.

Do you think that the women’s game as a whole has grown and become stronger in that time?

There is no question that the women's game is growing and becoming stronger. The players are now much fitter than they ever were; stronger physically and also techinically better. They are also improving tactically all the time. The players, in virtually every club in the SWPL, put a massive number of hours into their development each week, with many doing twelve to fifteen training sessions a week, including every morning at 7.00 am. We still have much to do to have the Scottish public perceive the game as a watchable product but I am sure this will come in time. I was at the women's champions league final in Munich last year when Lyon beat Frankfurt in front of over 50,000 supporters and I am sure everyone of them would testify that women can play football to a very high standard.

With the double-header against City out the way, what’s next for Celtic in the coming weeks?

We have league games against Kilwinning, Hamilton and Falkirk, over the next few weeks, which will all pose their own problems for us. They are games we eagerly look forward to and will be preparing as well as we can to try and achieve positive results in each of the games.

You play a lot of your home games at Lennoxtown. Can fans come and watch the matches there and how can they find out more about the team as a whole?

Yes, fans can come along and watch and we have had pretty decent support at all our matches for which we are very grateful for their backing of the team. More information can be found by visiting the Celtic website and selecting 'Teams' from the menu bar and looking under 'Women'. Also they can keep up to date by following us on twitter at @CelticFCWomen.